Distance Education Tools - Multimedia Learning & Authoring

Using and creating animations, diagrams, visualizations, simulations, games...

Sample Animations
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10317116.stm
Sample simulations and other interactive multimedia
Sample educational games
- ECON 201 - Course presented as a game
- Light bot - teaches programming
- Manufactoria - engineering/state machines game
- Educational games for consoles (Nintendo DS, Playstation, etc.)
  - Scribblenauts
  - Little Big Planet
  - Kodu
Visualization tools
- Concept mapping
  - See the Concept Maps page
- Timelines
  - http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
  - http://timeglider.com/
Multimedia Learning Research
- 25 principles of multimedia learning
- Search 'multimedia learning' for several books and articles. Here are some example:
- http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/valuemedia/The_Value_of_Multimedia.pdf
- http://prst-per.aps.org/accepted/Y/28072Le8Ace1420bc099000960a7c5421b0b978e0
- Chapter summaries of a book on multimedia design - http://mlmiller.myweb.uga.edu/6200project/alessi.htm
Videogames in Education Research
- There is a ton of research and enthusiasts for the use of videogames in education. Overall, the evidence is mixed but promising.
- James Paul Gee's work
  - Good videogames and good learning (pdf)
  - What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (book)
  - Video: Grading with games
- Games, Learning, Society conference
- Game Education Summit
- Serious Games
- Games in Education
MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching - an organization, conference, and database of multimedia and websites for learning (gets a bit out of date, though): http://www.merlot.org/
Multimedia Authoring
- Easy authoring of comic-book-like or trailer-like animations
  - Xtranormal
  - GoAnimate
    - Example: http://tech-in-ed.ning.com/
  - Fuzzwich
  - Animoto
- Programming Animations
  - Processing & ProcessingJS (first is java applet, second one is javascript/html5)
  - Browser-based IDEs (integrated development environments: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/browser-based-ides/
- Kids' Programming Environments
  - Scratch
    - Sample Project created by someone: Magic Color http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/kokid10/963119
  - Alice
  - Kodu for Xbox
- Authoring Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
  - Adobe Flash
  - Java applets
  - HTML5 & Javascript
- Creating mobile apps
  - See the mobile learning page, for example: http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/17/rapid-authoring-tools-for-creating-mlearning-2/
  - Also see App Inventor for Android: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ode/docs/entrypage.html?pli=1
Creating Games or Simulations
- GameMaker
- Search for 'game development' to find tons of books and sites.